Property rights to the physical object belong to the UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright,
are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright
and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

Provenance/Source of Acquisition

Purchased from J. G. Stanoff, Booksellers, 1970.

Processing Note

Cataloged by Jonathan Naito with assistance from Jain Fletcher and Laurel McPhee, September 2004, in the Center For Primary
Research and Training (CFPRT).

Little is known about Alberto Muller Schaertlin, other than that he seems to have been a man with unfulfilled literary aspirations.
Notes inside the front cover indicate he lived in New York City during the 1930s before moving to Los Angeles in the second
half of the decade. The second page of material tipped in between the front endpapers claims that the author spent two years
in Europe doing research after the manuscript was completed. He registered
The Yellow Count with the Author's League of America in 1934, and the Screen Writers Guild in 1940. He may have been of Swiss origin or heritage
(Schaertlin enclosed a copy of a letter by Max Graf, the chancellor of the Consulate of Switzerland in Los Angeles, in which
the chancellor praises the manuscript, suggesting that it will be popular as a novel and a film in both the United States
and Europe.) The materials in the appendix also suggest that Schaertlin was very interested in Japanese imperialism.

Scope and Content

The typescript is the fictional account (with supporting documentation) for the story of Igor de Tilinsky, a Russian who had
served in the army during the Russo-Japanese War. Tilinsky claimed to possess a contract drawn up by the Japanese during the
war promising 138 million yen in exchange for Russian military secrets. However, the contract stipulated that the sum was
to be paid on March 22, 1915; in the years leading up to 1915, Tilinsky and two associates traveled from Odessa to Zurich
to London, attempting to make lavish purchases in exchange for future payments from this windfall. Approximately one quarter
of the manuscript is devoted to appendices with background material gathered by Schaertlin, apparently during a two-year stay
in Europe. The appendices include material on the historical background of Japanese imperialism, typed transcriptions of newspaper
articles and legal documents, and photostats of documents from the British Museum. The articles emphasize that the Japanese
contract was a hoax, though it is clear that the story also had its believers, especially among those who doubted that the
Japanese could have defeated the Russians at Port Arthur without inside information.

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.